Shifting Continuities Interventions,Passages and Microstructures: a two person exhibition with Christoph Dahlhausen (Germany) David Thomas ( Australia)Curated by Lesley Harding

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND: In Shifting Continuities: Microstructures and Passages, David Thomas and Christoph Dahlhausen engaged with perception, time, light, space and colour. The exhibition was informed by minimalist, non-objective and conceptual practices that employed 2 and 3D works in a series of subtle in situ interventions in transitory spaces and overlooked zones to highlight the way we navigate and value the temporary nature of experience. Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (France) and installation artist Robert Irwin (US) inspired Thomas and Dahlhausen's research for this exhibition. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: For this exhibition, both artists researched and recalibrated the museum space to challenge what viewers see and sense and how they arrive at such perceptions. Thomas and Dahlhausen used paint, metals, vinyl, light and mirrors in a series of site specific creative interventions to explore how we negotiate our way and meaning through artworks. With an interest in the monochrome and its complex relationship to conceptual, formal and spatial modalities, the artists incorporated a site and social specificity into the artworks "to offer delicate points of re- orientation for the spectator across a range of aesthetic, spatial and temporal registers. They ask us to think through the building/art gallery as a complex entity of walls, light sources, surfaces, even temperatures, all of which are dynamic ingredients in the potential interplay of art and architecture". (David Cross, Shifting continuities / Christoph Dahlhausen, David Thomas, catalogue, Bulleen, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2010). RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: Shifting Continuities was curated by Lesley Harding at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. It was the second collaborative work for Thomas and Dahlhausen following their exhibition at the Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche, Osnabrück in 2007. The research collaboration brought together interests from their individual practices in post-minimal and conceptual art.